Wednesday, 24 October 2007

Balanced binary search trees

The OCaml Journal just published an article describing why balanced trees are so important in functional programming languages and how they can be implemented easily and efficiently in OCaml:

"Immutable data structures are a core concept in functional programming and balanced binary trees are the single most important such data structure. The OCaml programming language allows balanced binary tree implementations to be written clearly and efficiently. This article describes the design and implementation of a basic balanced binary search tree data structure similar to that of the built-in Set module..."